Posted
by
timothyon Sunday May 03, 2009 @02:32PM
from the reciprocity-is-just-good-manners dept.

mpetch writes "In an interesting twist, it appears that H1N1 influenza can be transmitted from humans to swine. Apparently a Canadian pig farmer vacationed in Mexico, returned to Canada and infected about 10% of the swine on an Alberta farm. The swine subsequently developed flu symptoms."

US exports $5 billion+ pork each year. Mexico imports most of its pork from US/Canada. Other countries such as China know that the swine flu was much more likely to have incubated in the massive pig farms of US and Canada before transferring to humans, rather than the other way round as so called "news" like this try to make us believe.

"China was also selective, banning only pork from Texas, California and Kansas, while the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates and Ecuador said theyâ(TM)re stopping all U.S. pork imports, according to Nefeterius Akeli McPherson of the U.S. trade representativeâ(TM)s office."China ban US pork [google.com]

Complete and utter crap. The AC posted the same garbage in another thread. I'll repost my comments on the subject.

Most of what you are saying is flat out wrong.... In the same (very bizarre) order as the parent:

0. The presence of mercury in vaccines is a red herring. We're talking about 62.5 micrograms per dose. You get that much mercury from eating a typical portion of tuna. An average adult gets nearly that much every week from dental fillings alone. This theory for the cause of autism seems pretty impl

You're right that it reacts with ascorbic acid. I've also read that it breaks down in the presence of citric acid, but IANAC, so I can't be 100% certain that this is correct. Either way, the ingredient to avoid is the sodium benzoate, not the citric acid.:-)

And don't get anywhere near your car, gasoline can contain up to 1% benzene:).
Actually, the idea of being able to reduce benzoic acid to benzene is nonsense, you get benzalcohol that route. You'd need to be able to decarboxylate.

Getting near, even inside, my car does not expose me to gasoline. And it's an old car.;-)
OTOH, foods and beverages often deliberately contain benzoates.
Apparently, ascorbic acid, at least, can decarboxylate benzoate....

But it does undergo decarboxylation. It has been shown in multiple studies, including one by the FDA, that sodium benzoate does, in fact, turn into benzene when acidic products use it as a preservative. The amount of benzene depends on temperature and light (e.g. refrigerated cans would have lower levels than room temperature clear plastic bottles). Several soft drinks over the years have shown levels of benzene that were well outside even the most lax exposure limits for benzene in drinking water.

The parent post does seem to be a troll, and I don't agree at all with the conclusion---halting trade is absolutely backwards---but ironically there is a kernel of truth in there. The health conditions in Mexico did play a significant role in creating this mess, and we have only ourselves to blame for that.

The health of the poorest, most third-world country affects the health of everyone in the world. This is why we should have more trade with these countries and do everything we can to bring up the stand

The most probable cause for this is CAFO farming in Mexico with even more lenient legislation than the ones you see in the US.

Its not a matter of "poor sanitation" in Mexico. Its a matter of US big bussiness being completely irresponsible and a government, here in Mexico, that tends to say "YAY" to anything the US government says, including permiting CAFO farming here because "it creates jobs"... or so said the Bush people when they vouched that smithfield was a great company to be producing pork in Mexico.

Agreed. In my town, the state and municipal governments, eager to cut profitable deals with USA corporations,1) Green-lighted a huge sanitary landfill very close to the sea shore.2) Approved the construction of an industrial gas distribution center, smack in the middle of a wine valley that is gaining international recognition.

However, the local population agrees that the natural beauty of the region would be put to much better use in long-term visions of tourism, and once you mess it up, it stays messed u

but I'm not afraid of the flu. I think we should name it what Fox News suggested. The Black Plague 2.

Yeah I love the way the major news networks hype this up. "This is what we want you to be afraid of today!" Anyone remember hoof-and-mouth disease? Mad cow? How about SARS? Bird flu? There's probably a few I'm forgetting. All terrible horrible epidemic plagues that were going to kill us all, or so you'd think from listening to the news. You want a population that's easy to control, you first have to make them afraid of something. Of course you could also choose to think that all of these things are accidents or coincidences...

My understanding was that there was some amount of genetic reassortment that allowed the swine flu to be infectious to humans, and to transmit human to human. This altered virus is then somewhat different than the swine flu that typically infects swine, so I think that (in addition to not previously being documented) it is seen as interesting that the virus would jump back to the swine population after mutation. Of course, I may be completely wrong about this, and I encourage anyone better versed in virology to correct me.

Current reports indicate that this strain of H1N1 influenza contains genetic material from swine, avian, and human forms of the disease. That's probably why it can spread easily from humans to pigs; normally, a virus does not cross species unless there is frequent or prolonged close contact between the two, because making the leap depends on genetic mutation. In this case, the virus is already adapted to both hosts.

To further clarify, the name "H1N1" refers only to a particular configuration of two proteins on the surface of the virus (H is hemagglutinin and N is neuraminidase). The configuration of these proteins determines how the immune system will react to a given strain of influenza (i.e. which antibodies will be able to recognize and attack it), which is the most useful information to have when it comes to treating the disease, but there are other factors that determine a given strain's properties.

So the news here is not that H1N1 flu can jump from humans to pigs -- it can't, not necessarily -- the news is that this variety appears to be able to. And it's not that we didn't know this could be possible -- we've seen this kind of thing countless times, and in fact it's believed that all forms of influenza ultimately come from birds -- it's just that calling it "H1N1 flu" doesn't give us enough information to make those kinds of predictions about its virulence.

The H1N1 strain of type A influenza is the strain associated with the global influenza pandemic of 1918. In that year, not 190,000 but tens of millions of people died.

Normally, the people who die from influenza are the very young or the very old. The shocking characteristic of the 1918 variety was that a great many of the people who succumbed to the disease were young and fit. They went from being healthy and happy to being dead in an alarmingly short period. Immunology had not advanced far enough at that time to for doctors to understand why this was happening, but today it is believed to have been the result of a phenomenon known as cytokine storm, which is a severe autoimmune reaction. In other words, the patients died because they were so fit and had healthy -- their immune systems, reacting to the sudden threat, went nuts and attacked their own bodies.

Modern medicine could reduce the body count of such a flu dramatically, but if such a strain appeared again it would still be catastrophic. Treating viruses is still very difficult. There is still no cure for the common cold -- and, under normal circumstances, most people who get the flu just sit it out. Providing medicine for every patient in a true pandemic would be very costly and it's likely that there simply wouldn't be enough for everybody. It is also difficult to treat an autoimmune reaction in a patient that is already known to be suffering from a serious infection -- suppress the immune system and the virus wins. So don't assume that it would be easy to keep a new pandemic under control just because it's almost a century later.

So the reason for all the hubbub is clear. Scientists want to be the Paul Reveres of a future pandemic: The British are coming, they're not already here. So to arms now -- not when they're in our homes. Governments can be very slow-moving when confronted with unforeseen things and they often need this kind of uproar from the medical community before prevention protocols can kick in.

As others have pointed out, the H and N designations refer to the specific variants of two specific proteins that are exposed on the virus's surface.

Actually, it was I who pointed that out.

The strain of virus in the news these days does not contain the gene believed to have made the 1918 so deadly.

I hadn't read that scientists knew which gene(s) were responsible. As far my understanding, any knowledge we have about that strain is very limited, since virtually all known patients are dead. It is true, however, that the 1918 strain was also a variant of H1N1.

There have been a couple of breaks in that area. IIRC, there were some preserved tissue samples, and about two years ago, they dug up someone who was buried in permafrost who died from it, so they have a pretty good idea what the 1918 flu looked like at this point. They also tested it on macaque monkeys and got a cytokine storm. (Source: BBC [bbc.co.uk]) Also, a few months ago, they took some antibodies from still-living survivors and injected the antibodies into mice. Scientists were surprised to find that the an

is there any chance that this is how it started, a sick mexican passed it on to his/her pigs, then we assumed it was some horrible new thing that had managed the pig-human jump? I am quite possibly talking out my arse since i am not a viroligist or whatever the appropriate field would be

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

I believe the above passage is a prediction of this epidemic by the nascent brain [thedailywtf.com] of Skynet.

It appears to be different strains of flu virus crossing species and undergoing genetic reassortment [birdflubook.com]. Where their is no direct infection route between species 'an intermediate host may be needed for genetic reassortment of human and avian viruses. Pigs are considered a logical candidate for this role because they can be infected by either avian or human viruses'.

As to how it jumps species in the first place, one way is to drink raw avian blood as in Tit Canh [ehow.com]. Then infect some tourist who gets on a plane and who coughs infected droplets into air that is recycled for a number of hours.

As to how it jumps species in the first place, one way is to drink raw avian blood as in Tit Canh [ehow.com]. Then infect some tourist who gets on a plane and who coughs infected droplets into air that is recycled for a number of hours.

Ok, we need to put a stop to this myth like thirty years ago.

THE AIR ON PLANES ISN'T RECYCLED.

Bottled oxygen and CO2 scrubbers are heavy and expensive, and completely unnecessary.* The plane is surrounded by a breathing medium that is perfectly adequate in every way except temperature and density. A problem which is solved by the same step: Compressed air is diverted from the engines before the fuel is mixed in. The compression is mostly adiabatic, so that raises the temperature, too.

He's still right. What you're saying is basically akin to saying that the air in a car is "recycled" because it's not moving 100% of the air mass at all times. For a good duration of the time you spend in a car with closed windows, you're breathing in the same air you breathed out a moment ago. But it isn't airtight, and there are vents, so 100% of it gets cycled out eventually.

When people speak of "recycled air" on an airplane they seem to think that aircraft are like submarines, completely airtight, and the only air is that which you had when you took off from the runway. This simply isn't the case -- it's all going to get cycled out and continuously refreshed. Of course a certain amount is getting recirculated, just as in a closed car, but sooner or later it's all fresh air. You're not landing with the same air molecules you had when you took off.

In commercial aircraft (I don't know about small craft like Cessnas), there are one or more apertures, usually near the rear of the plane, which can open and close to variable diameters, and that's part of how cabin pressure is regulated. You pump more air into the cabin than you let out through the aperture, and the result is a higher air pressure than what's outside -- and that air is indeed being pumped in from the outside, through the engines (which are basically doing nothing but forcing air around at high velocity anyway).

Incidentally this is also why shooting a gun in an aircraft and blowing a hole through the hull isn't the huge deal everyone thinks it is, resulting in decompression and a big crisis. If such a thing occured, the apertures would simply close a bit more to compensate for the drop in pressure, and all would be well -- at least as far as cabin pressure is concerned.

He's still right. What you're saying is basically akin to saying that the air in a car is "recycled" because it's not moving 100% of the air mass at all times. (snip)

When people speak of "recycled air" on an airplane they seem to think that aircraft are like submarines, completely airtight, and the only air is that which you had when you took off from the runway.

I guess either I misunderstood, or you did, but I wasn't thinking of "recycled air" in the submarine sense.

The OP spoke about getting infected from recycled air. Zippthorne said it was a myth. My answer quotes two articles which address the fear of contagion, and they seem to take for granted that the possibility exists:

All planes use HEPA (High Efficiency
Particle Air) filters to remove dust, bacteria, and viruses As the proportion of recirculated air provided for ventilation
is increased, energy savings can be experienced at the
same time as health risks raised.

of particular
concern in this setting is the increased risk of disease transmission... if any of the passengers should happen
to be ill with a disease which is communicable via air
(HOLLAND, 1996; SEXTON, 1993.

Recirculated air is usually filtered before being mixed
with outside air for return to the passenger cabin. However,
the efficiency of the filters used for this purpose varies with
airline policy from 90% for 0.5 Î¼m particles (European
Union (EU) 9 classification) to 99.97% for 0.3 Î¼m diameter
particles (EU 13, or high efficiency particulate air â" HEPA â"
filters))

According to the quoted articles, the filters should help stop propagation of viruses due to recirculation (as long as they're HEPA compliant or better), but the threat exists (mostly than

The pigs are fully covered under Canada's national health care, and are receiving medical attention at a Calgary hospital. Attorneys for the patients would not comment on their plans for a possible lawsuit against the farmer. Provincial authorities also remained tight-lipped over reports of bringing possible charges of bio-terrorism. "When you have an attack that leaves over 200 victims in it's wake, most of them unable to speak for themselves, then we've got a responsibility to act", said one official who wished to remain anonymous.

Stay tuned to CBC News for further updates on this developing situation.